Last year Mr Glasheen marked his 20-year anniversary on the island - and for years, the world has become enraptured by the story of the Australian millionaire turned castaway, who walked away from his life and became Australia's real life Robinson Crusoe in 1997.

He has endured the toughest landscapes in the largest unspoilt wilderness in Northern Australia and one of the last remaining wilderness areas on Earth.

"The wild is pretty severe. It's a tough world. Things are forever going wrong, and you've just got to deal with it.

"You've got to work with the elements. People assume you turn the tap on and the water comes out. You start to realise it's not like that. You're in charge of all that here."

Except for the annual grocery shop to Cairns, Mr Glasheen spends most of his time on the island, where he has lived in a renovated WWII outpost.

Mr Glasheen's former dog, Quassi, survived two attacks before succumbing to a taipan snake's bite. The inland taipan is the most venomous snake in the world.

A stockmarket millionaire in the '80s, Mr Glasheen was living the high life in Sydney as the chairman of a Sydney-based company which specialised in gold mining in Papua New Guinea.

A common death adder snake.

David Glasheen pictured with his first dog Quasi. Picture: Brian Casey

At this stage he was worth a cool $US28.4 million, which he invested in luxury real estate along Sydney Harbour. But after the "Black Tuesday" crash (known to the rest of the world as the Black Monday crash) on October 19, 1987, the Dow Jones dropped a record 508 points, and subsequently, Glasheen's stock began to rapidly drop too.

Mr Glasheen lost $7.25 million that day alone, and the next few years would see his life spiral into bankruptcy and a broken family that couldn't be pieced back together. He divorced his wife in 1991.

By 1993, after the banks had moved in, Mr Glasheen heard of a lease available on an undeveloped 64-acre island within a national park in Cape York, on Australia's remote peninsula: Restoration Island.